Google SERP changes May 2016
Search Engine Journal (searchenginejournal.com) has an article out regarding some recent changes showing up in Google's search engine results. Titles and descriptions are both being lengthened. They do caution that these changes may be just temporary and could disappear at any time.
From the article:
"Title tags have been increased to 70–71 characters, which is up from its previous 50–60 characters. That’s at least enough to fit in another word or two.
Meta descriptions have been increased by 100 characters per line, and extended from two to three lines. That’s a significant increase, and presents far more of an opportunity to tell searchers what the page is about.
Slegg reports that Google is still truncating the descriptions to two lines for many search results still, so you may still see them coming in at around 160 characters at times. When an three line snipped is display they come in at 278 characters per line."
Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-titles-and-descriptions-2016/163812
Recent Comments
12
Hello Bob
Thank you for the information. I will monitor this, and when it is fully operational I will make changes to take advantage.
I do not see meta description changed anywhere. For the title did not check. There is no announcement from Google so this is nothing sure yet. I would rather not make changes in snippets.
For some results:
"Meta descriptions have been increased by 100 characters per line, and extended from two to three lines."
But not all:
"Slegg reports that Google is still truncating the descriptions to two lines for many search results still..."
Since there's no official announcement of these changes, I'm not making any changes either. They could very well go away in a few days.
Thank you Bob, I hope this will become official because meta description is really short. Recently, I have been adding some catchy words into titles and they became too long, so this new policy might come good to what I did. Please let us know if Google announces something.
While I'm hoping for an official change as well, one never knows with the Big G. I'm keeping my eyes open.
I wonder if the extra line is linked to the increased use of micro data - so it's mainly local businesses who will see the benefit and can add in star ratings, geotargeting data (locality, promotions).
That's pretty god news. I wonder why. Then again, no I don't. I think we've all grown accustomed to Google tweaking their rules on a regular basis :-)
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